Tech Culture: CNET Live: October 18, 2007

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>> Coming up on CNET Live the Motorola Ming; it's the thing.
>> Yeah that thing's a paper weight I hear.
>> Plus a way to put any website on your mobile phone. And a video search engine that wants to give you money.
>> Yes.
>> Open up your wallets. It's time for CNET Live.
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>> Howdy. It's CNET Live everybody. Another beautiful Thursday here in.
>> Actually it's pretty nice out.
>> It's very nice here in downtown San Francisco. I'm Brian Cooley with Tom Merritt. You know how it goes. The phones are open-- 888-900-CNET.
>> Brian: You sit back there in cool, comfortable relaxed repose and you make us sweat with questions that are really hard.
>> Tom: Right. You dial, Cheryl picks up the phone and gets you all settled and lined up to be on the show.
>> Brian: Hello Cheryl. There's Cheryl.
>> Tom: And then we will pick up the calls in here and try our best to give you an answer.
>> Brian: Hmm and it's always dicey but the one thing we can always count on are the two great things we crave.
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>> Tom: These are some of our favorite things from the Crave Blog at crave.cnet.com and I know it's not even Halloween yet but mine is a Christmas tree.
>> Brian: What?
>> Tom: It's a wireless power Christmas tree.
>> Brian: Ooh.
>> Tom: Oh yeah.
>> Brian: Ok now wait a minute, you got my attention.
>> Tom: No cords. You just plug one unit into the electrical outlet wherever you want in the room, within a few feet, like ten feet or so, and then by radio waves it sends power to the Christmas tree so you can put it wherever you want.
>> Brian: This is something that a few years ago we never thought would happen--wireless power, it's low current.
>> Tom: Yeah.
>> Brian: But they're doing it. We saw an early demo of this.
>> Tom: It's just enough to light some LED lights.
>> Brian: Yeah LED lights; that's how it works, if they were filament bulbs, forget it. You couldn't push enough power. We saw this at CES with a lamp that would charge portables.
>> Tom: No more cords trailing all across the room, tripping you and the dogs, or the ones where the lights are actually on the floor and you don't want to step on them.
>> Brian: You join the carpet for no reason. What's the price?
>> Tom: It's only like 395 bucks.
>> Brian: I don't like it anymore.
>> Tom: It will come down. Get it after Christmas.
>> Brian: Here's something. That's always fun. Save it in the attic for 11 months. This I can't believe I ever would say. Editor's Choice and Sony in the same sentence when it comes to an MP3 player.
>> Tom: For a music player that's.
>> Brian: That's amazing.
>> Tom: With the Walkman line has had some good ones before.
>> Brian: Yeah but not great.
>> Tom: What's up with this one?
>> Brian: This one is just a great iPod alternative. Now it's just like an iPod. It has no FM radio, no voice recorder, no line in. So they're giving you less for more, like Apple.
>> Tom: So it actually has as better chance of competing. So if it has less.
>> Brian: Great display, great audio quality. I think it's a very elegant looking thing. It's not funky, but it's really elegant looking; about 180 bucks for 8 gig I think it is.
>> Tom: Cheap, oh 8 gigs, small capacity, but it's like a Nano though, it's competitive.
>> Brian: And we just love the audio quality and the interface on it.
>> Tom: It's cheaper than the Christmas tree.
>> Brian: Sony welcome to creditability in MP3 players.
>> Tom: All right.
>> Brian: So it's the A810 or the 818, two models of that. Let's get some calls.
>> Tom: Very nice. Let's go get some calls. 888-900-CNET is the number and who do we have on the line here Brian?
>> Brian: That's a good question because I'm going there right now. We're gonna go to Andrew in Connecticut. Huh speaking of things that are wireless, we have a cordless question. Hello Andrew, welcome to CNET Live, you're our first call. What's on your mind?
>> Andrew: Hi I had a couple of questions about cordless phones. I was wondering if there was one I could use both with voice and with a traditional landline.
>> Brian: Ok. Landline and cordless phones. You know I've got to be honest with you, we don't do a whole lot of cordless phone reviews at CNET but we're about to do a little research for you right now.
>> Tom: Yeah there are definitely Vonage mix phones that are cordless but whether they can actually work with both the landline and the VoIP.
>> Brian: Yeah the landline is the hard part. Netgear makes a good VoIP cordless phone.
>> Tom: I guess the thing is you could actually use an adapter to use any of them. You can use an adapter to make your VoIP to plug into a regular old telephone line and then you can use any cordless phone with it.
>> Andrew: But then I can't use both lines at the same time.
>> Tom: Right, okay. So you want to be able to use the cordless and the landline at the same time. You want to have like two lines going into the cordless essentially?
>> Andrew: More or less, yeah.
>> Brian: I think I might have an idea here on one from V-Tech, Bluetooth enabled; yeah this might do it for you here let me see. V-Tech's got one; they make the real slick looking kind of long-thin aluminized surface. I see them at the office stores and Best Buy. The LS5415 cordless, it can act as a wireless headset for your mobile as well as making standard, landline and/or VoIP calls. So this might be one to start with, by no means the only one but there's a look at it there--V-Tech. I see them in the office stores and I also see them at the big boxes so start with them. They also have really cool color displays on many of their phones.
>> Tom: There's also the iPhone. No I'm serious--the iPhone from Cisco. Remember that whole thing?
>> Brian: Oh the other iPhone, right. The real iPhone. The first.
>> Tom: The first iPhone. It's still called the iPhone and it's from Linksys [assumed spelling] actually which is a subsidiary of Cisco, and that is actually a dual landline VoIP phone. Hi Cheryl. There it is.
>> Brian: All righty, yeah, that's another idea. So there are too good ones for you and both of those have a really good looking hardware and interfaces I think. Okay let's get another call in here. Let's go to New York and we're gonna talk to Stevie now who's joining us with a question about virtualization. It's always been a hot topic here on the show. Hey Stevie welcome to CNET Live.
>> Stevie: Hi. I was wondering how I could boot from a virtual computer. Like I have a virtual machine and it's running really slowly so I was thinking maybe I could boot into it in VMware or something, and I thought maybe I could use Mboot to but I don't really know what to do.
>> Brian: So you wanna boot directly into the virtualization mode is that right?
>> Stevie: Yes.
>> Brian: Okay hmm.
>> Tom: Well do you want to boot directly into the virtualization or you just want to use a different operating system?
>> Stevie: I just want to use directly into the virtualization without using Windows.
>> Tom: Without using Windows like in other words if you could virtualize within Linux that would be okay?
>> Stevie: Yeah.
>> Tom: Cause I don't know a way to boot directly into the virtualization because the virtualization's running within an operating system, but you could definitely run virtualizations within Linux. WINE is one of them. Wine is a way to virtualize Windows applications within Linux. I used to actually run Lotus Notes from my Windows partition in Xandros and it was just virtualizing the Lotus Notes Windows application; so you can definitely do that. You can virtualize within Linux. I don't know of a way to boot into the virtualization without running the operating system because the virtualizing software has to have an operating system to run.
>> Brian: Otherwise you can just macro the actual load into the virtualizer.
>> Tom: So you just need to find a virtualization for the OS that runs in Linux--one you like.
>> Brian: All right good luck with that one. Let's get--we'll go to the video now. Oh okay.
>> Tom: Oh we've got an e-mail actually. We do get electronic mail. They type in cnetlive and the at symbol.
>> Brian: Oh the at symbol. I've seen that on the keyboard.
>> Tom: And then cnet.com and we get their e-mails right here. In fact we've got several; we've got one from Bob, we've got one from Josie; we've got one from Seresh and they're all asking pretty much the same thing.
>> Brian: They're all together?
>> Tom: No these are separate e-mails.
>> Brian: Oh okay. You said e-mail.
>> Tom: They didn't know each other. Well is e-mail plural? E-mails or e-mail.
>> Brian: E-mails always sounds like saying "I'm going down to Lucky's to get some milk. It's not really right.
>> Tom: Exactly or a pint of something. Anyway how can I put my old videotapes onto DVD? That was basically the essence of all their questions. The short answer is a converter; and the longer answer is today's Insider Secret.
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>> Got a bunch of these cluttering up your house? There's no reason you can't magically change them into these. Hi I'm Tom Merritt, Editor from CNET.com and on this edition of Insider Secret, I'm going to show you how to turn your bulky old videotapes into nice thin DVD's.
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>> There are three main ways you can get your videotapes onto DVD. I'm going to tell them to you from easiest to hardiest. Easiest probably seems most obvious. Make somebody else do it. There are services out there that will take your videotapes from you and put them onto DVD and ship them back to you. Now this is probably really good if you've only got two or three videotapes, or if you've got hundreds and hundreds of them and you'll never get them on to DVD in a lifetime. Just remember either way it's gonna cost anywhere from 20 to 50 dollars per hour of content on your videotape for them to convert them into DVD's; so if you do have hundreds it can be pretty costly. Now the next easiest way is to buy a piece of equipment like this one; it's a VHS-DVD recorder combo. And the way this works is it takes your videotapes and plays them and automatically records them to DVD without you having to do anything. The down side of it is that there are limited editing functions if you wanted to change the way the content was on there. Let's take a look how it works. I'm going to take one of my old videotapes and pop it in here and then take a blank DVD and pop it in here. Now once they're all in there and ready to go I'm gonna make sure I have this cued up which I already have, and then I'll just press one button that says push that VHS over to DVD. Now on this model it makes me hold the button for three seconds. Then it asks me before I get started if I want to finalize the DVD once I'm done recording. What finalizing does is allows this DVD to be played on any DVD player, not just this deck right here. It also stops you from adding things later. So in my case, I've just got an old video from college that I want to put on here and I'm done. So I'm gonna say yes go ahead and finalize so I can play that on my regular DVD player. However, if you want to put more than one videotape on your DVD, you want to say no don't finalize; I'm gonna put more tapes in and add to this DVD and then you'll finalize after you're done putting in the last tape. So I'm gonna press the record button and say yes I want this thing to be finalized at the end. Now the one thing about these machines is they record in real time so however long your videotape is is how long it will take to record it onto the DVD. I'm gonna sit back and relive some old memories here, you don't have to do that with me. I'll be back in just a minute to show you what to do at the end of the process.
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>> Tom: We're back. My embarrassing old video is burned here, as you can see I've got chapters up and everything. Now these units run around 200 dollars on average. This is actually much more expensive; it's a really high-end unit but there are also some cheaper ones. The difference is units like this will allow you some minimal editing; maybe picking your chapter points or adding in some basic titles to the DVD and the more basic ones will just put it straight on to the DVD for you. If you want to have more control over how these videotapes look when you put them on DVD, maybe add some special effects or whatever, you'll want a video conversion box. Something like this movie box right here. Now what this does is it connects your video source to the computer. So not only a VCR but if you have old camcorder tapes or maybe DV cams and you want to edit them, this will connect you up to your computer using a fire wire or a USB port. Now you'll also need some software, something like Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Premier. Software can run 99 to hundreds of dollars. Boxes like these run around hundred 150 dollars and you'll also need a DVD burner in your computer and that can be around 99 dollars itself so, more expensive, more time consuming but it gives you a lot more control over how that DVD looks at the end. So we've given you three ways to get those videotapes on to DVD; let somebody else do it; buy a piece of equipment and just put them right over, or get fancy and do it on your computer. Either way, you're gonna free up a lot of space in your house from these bulky old videotapes into these nice clean DVD's. Now I should mention we have a full weekend project on how to put the videotapes onto your DVD using the movie box and the computer. Look for that at CNET.com. That's it for this edition of Insider Secret, I'm Tom Merritt.
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>> Brian: I'm glad we covered that one because I can't tell you how often people ask me that and do so in e-mail; putting the old VHS tapes on DVD is such a great piece of housekeeping. So good Insider Secret for you to go back and watch again if you want to get the exact steps. Now we're going to talk about another angle on video. Great video search site called Blinkx, and joining me now is the founder, Suranga Chandratillake who's got this technology that lets us find video specifically. Siranga thanks for joining us.
>> Suranga: Thank you.
>> Brian: Now you've got a search engine here, very visual interface as we see and this is my video wall.
>> Suranga: It is.
>> Brian: With the search term, Brian Cooley displayed. You can see that the interface can be a wall of thumbnails, all I get back is video. There is no other kind of search median you're bringing back. Why a search engine just for video?
>> Suranga: Because there is more and more video content literally every minute of the day these days. And what's really very fascinating is that everything else on the web is very, very fragmented. The video lives all over the place and at sites like CNET of course, sites like CNN, sites like BBC, also of course all these generated sites like You Tube and Google video and so on. So basically the problem you hit is you know there's something out there that probably matches what you're interested in but you're not quite sure where to actually watch it, and that's where we come in.
>> Brian: Now again this is not a video community. I'm not joining Blinkx and submitting Blinkx video and you're just showing that. This is not another You Tube; this is a PAN [assumed spelling] platform video search and aggregator.
>> Suranga: That's right.
>> Brian: And the answer you didn't give us about why Blinkx exists is because Google sucks at this. Google's video search just doesn't work well.
>> Suranga: If you say so, certainly.
>> Brian: You have to agree, I mean.
>> Suranga: Obviously the reality is that the big focus from the larger players in the market as well as some of the smaller players has been on the video hosting and they're building a site where you can, as a member of the community, provide content and then come and watch it later or share with friends which is great and that's working very well.
>> Brian: Yeah that's working well.
>> Suranga: Yeah. What doesn't exist so much is an actual PAN site search and for example Google video actually searches its own content so it's a sort of centralized single system, whereas what we're trying to do is have a gateway to everything.
>> Brian: So in the future, going long term, will I be using Blinkx to search video and let's say Google to search everything else? It seems like a kind of an awkward two-tool model.
>> Suranga: Yeah I think you'll do both. There will be times when you know that you're particularly looking for a video and you may turn to something like Blinkx and use that. But one thing that we do at Blinkx is we actually work with all of the existing search companies to provide video results for inclusion in their own systems. So we work with a whole load of companies but one of them example is ASK, obviously a major search engine. If you do a regular search on ASK and there are relevant videos, you'll get a little rail that will come up on the right hand side that will basically show you related videos. Now you can focus in on those if it really is video you want, or you can look at those mixed in with everything else. The concept is universal search; I'm sure you've heard of it. ASK is pretty much the first place to really do it properly.
>> Brian: All right so you're kind of feeding up into that.
>> Suranga: Exactly.
>> Brian: Let me ask you about the folks who want to make some money off of trafficking video. You guys have got an ad technology called Ad Hoc.
>> Suranga: That's right.
>> Brian: It lets me make a little bit of money by helping the videos that you search out. If I get those in front of folks you'll pay me. How does that work?
>> Suranga: Yeah it's very simple. I can actually show you how it works.
>> Brian: Yeah why don't we go and show me.
>> Suranga: Let's do that. This is again the regular Blinkx site; down here you can see there's a link to the Blinkx Ad Hoc system--let's click on that. So just before I jump into it let me tell you a little bit of background. What we do at Blinkx is we have special technology which processes video. So we read the meta data, we read the text, we understand what the video is about based on that, but what we do very uniquely is we use things like speech recognition and vision analysis to actually have computers watch the video, understand what's going on.
>> Brian: That's what I was gonna ask you. So you guys know what I'm saying to a degree, not just what's in the graphics that are put out with the published version.
>> Suranga: Yes, exactly.
>> Brian: That's interesting.
>> Suranga: So it gives us a really, really deep understanding of what the video is about and if you think about it, a show like this, it will have a summary; you'll probably include some of the key things you're covering but it won't be all the details.
>> Brian: It's not every word.
>> Suranga: Exactly but that's in the speech and that's what we can pick up on. So until now what we've primarily done with that technology is to let you search across all that content.
>> Brian: Okay.
>> Suranga: But what we're doing with Ad Hoc is letting you also find ads that are related to the content that you have. So the way it works that if you're somebody who shares videos by finding them on various sharing sites and then embedding those videos on your own blog or your own website for example, what you can do is go through a step at Ad Hoc.
>> Brian: And these videos can come from any of the various sources out there or the majors, Rever, You Tube.
>> Suranga: That's right. All of the big sharing sites. We support something like 50 already and we're basically adding them everyday.
>> Brian: All right.
>< Suranga: So if you've got one you can just take the embed code you found and paste it right in there. If you haven't found a video you want to use, you can.
>> Brian: It can be the code of a video I already have. Here's the list.
>> Suranga: That's right exactly. If you don't have one you can actually search for one and use it there. I'm going to pick one from this little list of suggestions right here. So let's say we're interested in Halo 3. We can click one and I'll open that just like that. And then what it does it takes you to an example of what's that going to look like; and what you can see is here is the You Tube player, it's a regular video player, the top you're getting relevant ads about that video.
>> Brian: Now this is a text bar. You're not doing a pre-roll in front.
>> Suranga: That's right and that's basically.
>> Brian: Why not? Is that a technology or is that a rights thing?
>> Suranga: No it's actually more of a user experience thing. So we've tried it with pre-rolls but the reality is pre-rolls they're pretty annoying. Most people who embed a video like this they do that because it's a short, sharp interesting video, they don't want to have to sit through a 3-minute pre-roll first or a 30-second pre-roll. So we're keeping it based on text content. The great thing is you get to watch the content but you get the ads at the same time. Now the nice thing is you can now scroll down here to the bottom, you can see some more embed code. If you copy this and paste this in your blog then you'll get the video player as before but with the ads as well.
>> Brian: Okay so you're doing the whole thing for me. You're putting the interface together.
>> Suranga: Exactly.
>> Brian: And I just put that into my blog, my page or whatever and there it is and then you're gonna send me a check for 50% of whatever CPM based traffic we drive together.
>> Suranga: That's it. That's exactly it.
>> Brian: Okay. Generally speaking, what kind of money are we talking? What kind of a CPM is there on this?
>> Suranga: Well it's a click through model so you only get paid when the click actually happens.
>> Brian: Okay click on the text bar and to go see what that is.
>> Suranga: Yeah exactly. And to be honest the CPC is very wildly so the lowest we've seen is about 2 or 3 cents; the highest we've seen is about 20 or 30 dollars so it depends a lot on the ad.
>> Brian: Big difference.
>> Suranga: Yeah exactly, very big difference. Things like financial products and so on have really high CPM's, other things have low CPM's; but if you have decent traffic and you have a little video on your site, then it can add up.
>> Brian: Yeah obviously the more popular your blog or your site, the more you can drive. Especially if it's a lower CPC.
>> Suranga: Exactly.
>> Brian: All right. Suranga thanks for showing us Blinkx.
>> Suranga: Thank you.
>> Brian: Appreciate it. Suranga, let me get the name right, Chandratillahe, got it; founder of Blinkx, they're based right here in San Francisco, by the way one of our neighbors here in the Soma District and really a revolutionary video search tool. And that's a little bit what they're doing with the ability to share ad revenue as well if you're one of the folks who likes to put a bunch of video up on your site. Okay. Coming up we'll mix things up. Best of the web is next right after this.
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>> Searching for more Tech treasure? Go to CNET TV.com.
>> Let's check the Tech, check the Tech, check the Tech. Technology is leading the way and I want to show you some Tech highlights.
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>> CNET TV, up to our necks in Tech.
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>> Tom: Welcome back to CNET Live. I'm Tom Merritt and Brian Cooley. We're taking your calls at 888-900-CNET.
>> Brian: Okay let's get to one of those calls. We've got Arc Angel in New York. I always get nervous with these funny little . . . all right Arc how are you doing?
>> Arc: Hi there. I'm doing well, thanks.
>> Brian: What's on your mind today? What can we help you out with?
>> Arc: Well okay. I have a bunch of vivid space AVI files that I would like to try to load on my HD-TV in my home. The only problem is I would love to get a media center PC but unfortunately my family is not very PC savvy and they'll like me screw it up more than I'll actually use. So I was looking to see if there's maybe one device perhaps with a hard drive in it that I could actually store the stuff there and play it on my TV from there.
>> Tom: I just started to using the feature on relatively recent TVOs that let you move video from you're my TVO videos folder, buffer them over to your TVO and watch them there. I'm gonna check if a DivX AVI is compatible. I want to say it is. The DivX Kodak makes me nervous.
>> Tom: Another thing you can do is Xbox 360 and run T-versity [assumed spelling] on the computer you're storing videos on. T-versity allows you to stream anything over to an Xbox 360 and use 360 as a media center extender; and it's a good excuse to buy a gaming console. But really if you want to store all the videos in one thing and play them up there on the web, Media Centerpiece C is a good option. There was also.
>> Brian: Also the Netgear Digital Entertainer as a stand-alone box that has an Apple TV-ish interface; it's not that good, but it is kind of like a little Jezebel. It will take all comers to put up on that TV; so you might want to look at the Digital Entertainer from Netgear. I've had good luck with it. It can be a little prickly to set up but again it will take anything as far as I know and put it up on the screen as long as there is no DRM involved.
>> Arc: That sounds good.
>> Brian: Okay thanks for the call.
>> You bet. Appreciate it.
>> Brian: Right on. Okay now it's time for the best of the web. Best of the Web brought to you by our good, good, good, friends at CNET's webware.com. I'm showing you Mippin this week for a couple of reasons. One, this segment always gets cancelled so I get to go this week. Two, I get so frustrated by website that don't have a good mobile version. What Mippin does is with most but not all sites, it takes them and ports them to a mobile experience. Now you see what it looks like there on the phone on the right, very clean, they bring down the amount of content and navigation to make that simple, they scale it for the size of the screen and often for a vertical or a portrait orientation. They have a lot of partnerships down here; you see Tech Crunch, you see Paris Hilton, you're gonna see CNET's game spot down here, lot of good sites and there is also the ability I believe to add any wild card content. They have an application that might be the key tool for that. But Mippin is one of these things that has to exist because let's fact it websites have been asleep at the switch about porting their own sites to a mobile-friendly. It's just all over the web about how they do it and how they do it. So that's Mippin, that's mippin.com. M-I-P-P-I-N.
>> Tom: You know another way you can do that is to just get an iPhone.
>> Brian: Well, right there is always that. So whether you are hardware or serviced oriented, is which way you're gonna go there.
>> All right. We have an opinion call here. This is Jinel from Florida. Hello.
>> Jinel: Hello.
>> Tom: How are you doing Jinel? Thanks for calling.
>> Jinel: Good. How are you?
>> Tom: Good, good. We're hearing some echo. Can you hear that?
>> Jinel: Yeah.
>> Tom: Okay. Do you have your computer turned down?
>> Jinel: Yeah.
>> Tom: Okay I don't know where that's coming from. Anyway what's your question?
>> Jinel: Okay I have a question. Should I get the New Zune or an iPod's Xgeneration one?
>> Brian: Well, well, you're trying to start a little fight here on the CNET Live set aren't you?
>> Tom: What do you think? Zune 2 or iPod?
>> Brian: I'm a big Zuner but you know I haven't had the Zune 2's. I don't know if they're gonna be so impelling. I know that I've always had my Zune 1 because I couldn't get a big enough screen previously, pre-iPhone, pre iPod touch; now that's been equalized, neutralized, and I really like the interface on the Zune. I don't think it's any worse than on the iPod; I think it's a preference thing. The New Zune is gonna be thinner and it should have the same interface as far as I know, plus it'll allow you to use Wi-Fi to sync the device which an iPod won't do.
>> Tom: I would say Arco 604. I prefer something with a nice big screen; get out of the old iTunes universe.
>> Brian: Sort of prop you up as Mr. iPod. Come on, come on, back the iPod.
>> Tom: If I had to choose between the two I'd get an iPod.
>> Brian: So would the world.
>> Tom: Just because I don't to mess with that Zune store.
>> Brian: Yeah the Zune store is a little prickly and the Zune has issues with the kind of video it supports which is unconscionable. It doesn't support any of the DRM video I don't believe; only DRM 3 and that's outrageous at this point.
>> Tom: They say they're gonna get TV shows but they haven't yet.
>> Brian: They just haven't yet so to be safe, you always go iPod. Period.
>> Tom: Yep to be safe. Let's go to Kyle in Indiana. Kyle, welcome to CNET Live.
>> Kyle: Hey what's up?
>> Not much what's going on? What's your question?
>> Brian: What's up dude?
>> Kyle: My hard drive has been acting weird lately and I'm not sure if it's because of my operating system or if it's just because my hard drive is going bad. Lately, I woke up a month ago and my computer just locked up and then a couple months after that it just started running brand new disc checks even when I turned it off regularly like you do when you go to start shut down, so now a couple of weeks ago when I turned it on, about 50 or 60% of my programs won't run because files are missing. I backed up all my important documents to a 500 gigabyte external hard drive, but would it be safe to go ahead a reformat or is it coming to the conclusion that my hard drive's dying.
>>Tom: I'll tell you what--it doesn't sound very good. I would start by running a disk analyzer. Get a good hard drive analyzer; there's some good free ones online, you can look at download.com or get one from Norton, and just do a disk check and see if you can find any bad sectors. Once you've done that, if you find a bunch of bad sectors, just skip the next step and go get a new hard drive. If you don't find a bunch of bad sectors, you might just want to, like you say, reformat that hard drive, reinstall the operating system and then give it a go there and see what happens. Hard drives aren't that expensive but if you don't want to plunk down 100 bucks or so for a brand new one, that's the steps I would go through to try to avoid it. Otherwise you could probably get a much bigger capacity hard drive if you want a good replacement so.
>> Brian: And you might also want to check with the manufacturer of your drive, go to their site, they may offer a free downloadable utility that does what Tom's saying, get a good disk analyzer, but is really focused on their firmware and can read out errors really carefully. And I'll tell you sometimes these guys are very generous on their warranty so make sure you're not out of warranty. A lot of the drives have three-year warranties now. I think the Seagates do so you might be under warranty still.
>> All right. Next up. Our first look at a Motorola touch screen phone. That's right Apple isn't the only one doing this. It's the highly anticipated Motorola Ming.
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>> Hi I'm Kent German, Senior Editor here at CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a First Look at the Motorola Ming. It's also called the A-1200. It's a pretty unusual phone, it's a smart phone but it's a little bit more compact. It also has the split cover. You might this silver thing here is nothing but it's actually the ear piece. This is a touch screen, there's a stylus back here, you can pull it out and tap away to perform your functions, to make calls. You can either enter text via the virtual keyboard, which is fine though it's really, really, really small so you kind of have to squint and it's almost hard to press the right button, or you can use the handwriting recognition feature which works pretty well but it's a little pokey and the interface is pretty slow from writing something to actually getting it on the display. Here on the side we have a couple of volume keys, that traditional Motorola smart key, headset jack, 2.5 millimeter, so if you have a 3.5 millimeter device, headphones or whatever, you're just gonna need an adapter; and here we have a voice styling button. It isn't easy to press though. When the phone is in my hand, I kind of press it quite a few times and would have to wait for the function to run before I turn off. Here in the back I have a camera, a macro switch here on the top. Inside there is no Wi-Fi or 3G which is a little disappointing but there's a full HTML browser, a stereo Bluetooth, business card reader as well. Overall a good Smartphone, great for beginning Smartphone users but really, really power users probably aren't gonna be pleased. I'm Kent German and this is the Motorola Ming A-1200.
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<< Brian: Okay time for our last call folks before Tom and I go to last call.
>> Tom: Hey I'm getting bumped this week. No it's download of the week, I can't.
>> Brian: Told you, I moved up. Okay let's go to Ronnie in India. I hope it's not really Indiana. Hey Ronnie, welcome to CNET Live.
>> Ronnie: Yeah hi mates.
>> Brian: It's India, how are you doing?
>> Ronnie: Hello.
>> Brian: Hello, hello.
>> Ronnie: Mates how are you?
>> Tom: We're doing well.
>> Brian: You are our first call from India in the history of CNET Live so congratulations, and what can we answer for you today?
>> Ronnie: Well I just bought an iPod Touch from London a couple days ago. I wanted to know if you could install third party apps.
>> Tom: Yes you can.
>> Brian: That's a very Tom specialized question.
>> Tom: Are you running Windows or Mac?
>> Ronnie: Windows Vista.
>> Tom: Okay you are running Windows. There is a hack for the iPod Touch that will allow you to run third party apps. We got an e-mail from the kid who did it. Let's see. Current version of Touch free is hosted at Slovix.com/touchfree; that's the Windows version. There is also one by a guy name Eriks for the Mac and you can look that up as well. And then when the third party apps officially come from Apple starting this January, they just announced they're gonna do real third party apps so you don't have to hack your touch to use. Those will be available for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. So if you don't want to mess with anything, just wait for January and you'll be able to run apps on it then. If you want to mess around and do some hacking go to slovix.com.
>> Brian: Okay. Here we go--it's time for download of the week. Is that right control room?
>> Brian: Download of the week baby.
>> Tom: Time for the download of the week.
>> Brian: Yeah, we got 'em both in.
>> Tom: Download of the week is brought to you by our good friends at CNET's download.com and this week it's not one I can show you how to do because it's Darik's Boot and Nuke.
>> Brian: Oh yeah please don't show us exactly.
>> Tom: This is a way to wipe that hard drive absolutely clean. So our earlier caller if reformatting doesn't work and he just wants to get vengeance on the hard drive, or maybe he wants to sell it to somebody, this will do a 6 or 7, I can't remember, a 6 or 7 pass swipe of the hard drive. Because when you reformat, all it does is delete the table.
>> Brian: That's it.
>> Tom: Your data is actually still there until it actually gets overwritten. Darik's Boot and Nuke, if you're gonna sell a computer, will go through and try to obfuscate that data so that nobody can ever find it. They are actually used by the Department of Defense to wipe computers.
>> Brian: So it's the same level of destruction. I just create a bootable disk.
>> Tom: Yep.
>> Brian: And burn it on to CD.
>> Tom: Burn it on to CD, take an ISO disk, use your favorite burning tool, you put it on that disk, boot up from it, type in some commands, pick your level of destruction.
>> Brian: Are the commands pretty simple?
>> Tom: They're sort of press F1 for this, F2 for that.
>> Brian: Okay because I get a lot of requests from folks that are pretty computer non-savvy and they want to get rid of a machine but they heard.
>> Tom: It's all a menu system. You don't have to know any command switches although it does have a command prompt if you want to do that.
>> Brian: But you don't need to.
>> Tom: Yeah.
>> Brian: I like that. That's a very handy tool. Okay the old Darik Boot and Nuke. All right guys that's it for another CNET Live. Now next week, we've got Tim Westergren here from.
>> Tom: Yes Tim Westergren from Pandora.com.
>> Brian: Great music service.
>> Tom: So check in. I think you're gonna be out next week.
>> Brian: I don't even know.
>> Tom: But Molly Wood will be here.
>> Brian: I'll be at the bar.
>> Tom: And we'll have Tim Westergren from Pandora, the music service, at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. 'Cific, 5 a.m. Tokyo.
>> Brian: I like that.
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